Mississippi Sissy (6 page)

Our friendship—though he was almost thirty years older than I—deepened during the two years we got to know each other. He cast me as the newspaper boy with whom Blanche Dubois desperately flirts in a production of A
Streetcar Named Desire
he directed at the Vicksburg Little Theatre. We would talk and talk in his Pontiac LeMans on those ninety-minute round-trips from Jackson to Vicksburg during the six weeks we rehearsed and performed the play. We became so close, in fact, he sprung an odd request on me while we were listening on the LeMans's radio to a bare-bones country station. At first we had tuned in to the twangy numbers and corny, locally produced commercials as a sophisticated lark, but we discovered the longer we listened to that station, the less frequently our laughter came, and we had actually started to sing along with the weary reverence the now familiar lyrics called for. Frank got his start as a disc jockey over in Vicksburg and had a lifelong respect for the discipline and musical knowledge the job required as well as “the way a d.j. of any stripe must harness the mayhem of station life to soothe the listener into believing the lovely lie that there is order in this world.” He sometimes
confessed that he was at his happiest spinning records all alone in his little glassed-in cubicle, way back then in 1956, the very year of my birth, as I liked to point out to him.

“I have something I really must ask of you,” he had said that night on our drive back to Jackson, already blushing before the request could be made, his voice meekly skimming the surface of Skeeter Davis's toughened alto singing a James Taylor song, which was barely audible now from the radio Frank had turned way down. “I have an old trunk locked up in my closet. It contains . . . well . . . it contains what some might consider . . .” He gripped the wheel tighter. “Itcontainswhatsomemightconsider
pornography
,” he said, all the words rushing from him in a jumble and tumbling over that very last one. “There—I said it.” I turned my head and smiled out the window at the passing pines, an exit sign or two, some roadkill that looked like another opossum too slow to make it across both lanes of the Interstate. “Promise me, Kevin, that you will dispose of that trunk if anything ever happens to me. Promise me. My West Virginia family cannot find it upon my demise; they simply
cannot,”
he said.

“Of course, Frank,” I assured him. Though he did not mean for such a request to be regarded as funny by me, it was certainly seeming that way at the moment. I tried not to, but I could not help myself: I started to giggle.

Frank flipped up the volume of the radio just as Skeeter was going after her toughest James Taylor note. “Don't you dare laugh at me,” he said. “Don't you dare.” It was the only time I can remember his ever being curt as far as I was concerned. “I'm being quite serious. I've never been
more
serious. This is our secret. No, it is more than that. This, dear boy, is a
confidence,”
he said, imbuing the word with all the meaning he could muster as he launched into that haughty Mabel Mercer mode that could overtake him from time to time, one that seemed rather out of place in the presence of Skeeter. “I thought about asking Eudora, but there are limits to her empathy. I've
watched you closely this past year or so since we've gotten to know each other. Don't ask me why, but I trust you completely. You are remarkably free of judgment and yet you are preternaturally wary. It's a nice combination. You seem to be spying right there out in the open all the time, right there in our midst,” he said, nailing me. “It's quite disarming. Eudora even commented on it when she first met you. I asked her what she thought of you—I would not have included you in our sphere without her approval—and she said, ‘That child is so ripe with private assessments I'm surprised the skin hasn't begun to bruise. Does he
read
?' ”

“Yeah, I read,” I said. “I read her fucking short stories. She's no Flannery O'Connor.”

“Thank God,” said Frank. “There's all that Roman flimflam in Flannery. Eudora is more welcoming. You'll see, dear boy. One reaches a certain age and all one longs for is to feel welcomed.” I turned and looked at Frank. Really looked at him. Skeeter was singing the Taylor lyric “All those lonely times when I could not find a friend,” and I knew in that moment I had found my first true one. I felt—there is no other word for it—such tenderness toward him as I noticed there were tears beginning to fill his eyes. But he held them back. He did not let them fall. He had too much dignity for that. Too much grace. Those are the two main characteristics that Frank Hains so effortlessly possessed, and to this day, when I am lucky enough to summon one or both of them at the most unexpected of moments, I am certain that it is he—ever ephemeral, ever Frank—who is present and enabling me to conjure such characteristics in my own less dignified, less graceful life. Just as I feel his hand still on my shoulder in those moments, I put my hand on his in that one. “I'll get rid of that trunk if it means that much to you,” I told him. “Say no more.” And we never did. We never mentioned it again.

________________

By the time of that bourbon-drenched New Stage cast party for
Long Day's Journey into Night,
I had decided to rent Bleak House's front bedroom from Frank for the upcoming summer while I earned some much-needed money working at a Jeans West store in a local mall. I had recently auditioned for the Juilliard School of Drama, at Frank's encouraging insistence, and been accepted for the next term. Manhattan—and an even grander
What's My Line?
life—beckoned. But first I would have to get through the upcoming Mississippi months, which would prove, even with my tragic past, to be among the most difficult days of my life. As I look back on it now, that cast party for
Long Day's Journey
rivaled my first locker room visit with my father for its happy allure. The rooms were echoing with the sound of laughter and music and glasses being constantly filled. I knew Frank was certainly having a ball, for he loved playing host. “I'm the hostess with the most-ess,” he would sing under his breath, breezing through the place and making sure everyone was having a good time.

Back in the record library, Geraldine Fitzgerald had just finished singing an Irish ballad, one of the numbers she was preparing for a cabaret show in New York called
Street Songs.
Miss Welty, taking the cue, attempted to perform her own little musical ditty for a few of her friends surrounding her on Frank's low-slung, circa-1969 sofa: Jane Reid Petty, a beautiful petite blonde who was New Stage's resident diva (her performance as Edna Earle in Frank's stage adaptation of Miss Welty's The
Ponder Heart
endeared her to local audiences much less sophisticated than she); Charlotte Capers, Miss Welty's lifelong best friend, who was the head of the Mississippi Department of History and Archives; Miss Capers's protegee at the Archives, a smart-as-a-whip, willowy blonde named Patti Carr Black; and Karen Gilfoy, a mannish Rosalind Russell manque who decided to be a lawyer while learning most of Cole Porter's catalogue.

“When Eudora gets a little drunk like this, she always likes to show off,” Frank whispered to me as we admired Jackson's reigning
doyennes assembled before us. “Big Char there can really loosen her up,” he said. Miss Capers, in this crowd, was lovingly referred to as “Big Charlotte.” She hovered around six feet tall and loved—humorously, intellectually, socially—to throw her weight around. Frank and I were standing sofa-side at the stereo, which gave us a lay-of-the-party view. “Too much bourbon can literally bring out the Bea Lillie in Eudora,” he whispered.

“Who's Bea Lillie?” I asked. Frank rolled his eyes at me. Miss Welty's unsteady warble—she was certainly in no Yeats-spouting mood that night—tried secretly to amuse her pals. “Wait a minute,” I said, suddenly discomfited, a detail from an awful memory darting to the surface before submerging itself once more. “Is Bea Lillie Mrs. Meers?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” said Frank. “Mrs. Meers? Bea Lillie—a k a
Lady Peel,
not Mrs. Meers—is a great comic genius. Eudora says her recent autobiography has one of the best titles ever—
Every Other Inch a Lady.
Eudora loved that title so much I didn't have the heart to tell her Lady Peel stole it, paraphrasing a remark Rebecca West once made about some
gentleman
she could not abide. Lillie's voice was once described as that of a bunch of drunken fairies—quite apt for this room tonight—who have been hit over the head with a golden hammer. Shhh . . . listen . . . Eudora does a great Lady Peel.”

I looked over and was shocked to see Miss Welty, winking up at us, lower the strap on her dress. Vamping now, she exposed a bit of the flesh on her gibbous shoulder and continued her rhythmic high-pitched patter to her friends' muffled laughter:

Yesterday night—

I went to a
MAAAAAHVELOUS
party

With Nunu and Nada and Nell . . .

Frank held up the album he had just taken off his turntable. “Noël Coward,” he said, pointing to its cover. “Eudora's doing Bea Lillie doing
Noël Coward.” He put on some Mabel Mercer. “I met him once—Noël Coward. It was on a New York trip. We were all in the same room as Cardinal Spellman. Would you mind taking Eudora home tonight, dear boy? She's in no condition to drive herself and I have to stay around to tend to my guests. This party does not seem to be petering out. Perhaps I'll get out my
Noël Coward in LasVegas
record and play that last cut on it, ‘The Party's Over Now,'
very loudly.
Wait here. I'll convince Eudora it's time to go. Oh, God, she's starting in on ‘I'm a Camp-Fire Girl.'“

“But I want to stay. I'm having fun,” I whispered back at Frank while I kept staring at the dashingly handsome blond-haired thirty-five-year-old advertising executive, a New Stage stalwart, who was playing the older son, Jamie, in
Long Day's Journey.
His name was Carl Davis and he had made it very clear that he had a crush on me. I was ready to make it very clear that such a crush was a credible emotion. “Can't someone else take Miss Welty home?” I asked. “I think Carl's ready to make a pass.”

Frank placed an avuncular hand on my cheek and softly patted it. He sweetly, knowingly smiled. “Do as I say,” he said. “Take Eudora home. Trust me—you'll write about it one day.”

After Miss Welty wavered a bit on a “Camp-Fire Girl” lyric, Frank helped me escort her to the front porch. Behind us, the frivolity continued. “Kevin can take it from here, Eudora,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks. “Talk to you tomorrow. Have to get back to my guests.”

“You're such a sweet boy to be carting me home,” Miss Welty said, and allowed me to take her arm. My white Mercury Comet was parked on the little hill that led down to the Jewish cemetery. It had rained all day and we had to be careful not to slip as we traversed the treacherously slick blades of grass. I led her to the passenger side of the front seat and opened the door for her. “I'm fine now,” she said. I let go of her arm and hurried around to the driver's side. When I opened the door I discovered what Miss Welty just had: I'd forgotten
to clean off my front seat after I worked out that afternoon and my dirty gym clothes were still strewn where I had thrown them on her side of the car. She held my jockstrap pinched between her index finger and her thumb and was carefully placing it on the backseat. Her large rheumy eyes focused on my guilty face as surely as my father's had when it was I who held a jock so long ago in just such a manner.

“Sorry, Miss Welty,” I said as she wiped her fingers on her lap, the very same fingers—Fuck, I wanted to say aloud—with which every one of her stories had been typed on her old Underwood, upstairs in her bedroom over on Pinehurst.

She smiled at my embarrassment, then looked out her window at the neighboring grave sites. “Oh, I just thought that thing was a little Jewish ghost,” she said, now waving her hand dismissively. “We've all got our ghosts to tend to.” She looked back at me. She reached over and tapped my steering wheel with her story-telling fingers. “Now let's get goin',” she said.

When I was just getting used to being six years old, in the late spring of 1962, I had a crush on an older woman who lived across the street. She was eight and much more experienced than I. Gangly and snaggle-toothed, she had a dusting of freckles across her tanned nose like a sprinkling of cinnamon. She was, my neighbor, the most breathtaking of tomboys. This was indeed her initial allure for me: that tough coquettishness (fist on a hip, ever-flared nostrils, a sloe-eyed squint that could so easily size up oneself in another's eyes) that I would subsequently encounter during my Greenwich Village years hanging out in the Ninth Circle, a hustler bar on West Tenth Street where Janis Joplin reigned over the jukebox and Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Robert Mapplethorpe often browsed the denimed wares. The denim jeans my neighbor wore were handed down from her older
brothers and they always drooped enticingly about her waist. Her mother made sure they were also hugely cuffed so that they would not drag the ground around her dusty bare feet. Inside those cuffs she stored her gum, a dead cricket or two, and sometimes the butt of one of her mother's discarded cigarettes, which we would re-light, using the kitchen matches she had stolen, as we took turns precisely wrapping our own lips around the lipsticked stain left on the filter. I never once saw her cough as she downed the cigarette smoke and allowed it to float back up past her freckles. It would be years before she sprouted breasts and sprayed a first spritz of her mother's Avon behind ears that then always protruded from her flopping mop of unbrushed hair. “I don't want them titty things,” she would complain. She knew the word “titty” would make me blush and she liked me better when such embarrassment rouged my cheeks. It was this daring daintiness of mine—an unnerving natural grace, often ridiculed as girly—that no doubt attracted her to me. Though we didn't yet know exactly what sex was, we possessed complementary sexualities. It was the basis of our friendship.